


Your Next Mistake

by Saperli_Popette



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M, past Steve/Tony if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 20:00:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14362569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saperli_Popette/pseuds/Saperli_Popette
Summary: Tony has to watch those YouTube videos a lot in order to find out who that spider-themed vigilante is.Yep. That's totally the reason.





	Your Next Mistake

**Author's Note:**

> Technically, the "underage" warning doesn't apply, because Tony and Peter have no contact with one another during this fic. I went with the "better safe than sorry" policy, though, on the grounds that someone who is going to avoid fic with underage sex is also not going to like this.

The costume was frankly ridiculous. Those _goggles_ , for god's sake. Who fought crime wearing something like those? 

The spider-themed crime fighter (Tony had never thought of red and bright blue as being particularly spidery colors, but whatever, clearly costuming was not this guy's strong point) who was all over YouTube, however, was _not_ ridiculous. 

He was a lot more competent than the average masked vigilante--and Tony had seen a _lot_ of those, at least on video. A lot more impressive. Obviously not a normal human being; no normal human could catch a car like that. Or move that quickly, or climb walls like that. And Tony had dated a couple of gymnasts in his time, and even they hadn't been that agile--or that flexible, either. 

And that was _before_ Tony got to the part where the guy wrapped up criminals in some kind of webbing he shot from his wrists. (The video footage was pretty crappy, but Tony was at least ninety percent certain that he was using some kind of device to do it, rather than it being some kind of weird quirk of the guy's obviously quirky biology, which also meant that either he, or someone he knew, had the intelligence to _invent_ something like that and was therefore someone worth talking to.)

This was definitely someone the Avengers--well, more accurately, Tony, on their behalf--needed to keep an eye on. Not in a negative way: it might be crazy to catch muggers on the streets of Queens wearing a bright red hoodie with a spider design on it, but it wasn't the dangerous kind of crazy. 

No, this was somebody that they (or anyway, Tony, because someone had to do the actual planning) might want to give some real thought to recruiting. 

He'd have to check the guy out first, of course, make sure he wasn't some kind of disaster waiting to happen. They didn't need to recruit someone and then find out that he was only posing as a masked crime fighter in order to cover up for his day job as a serial killer. 

But before Tony could have the guy checked out, he'd have to figure out who he was, which was why Tony had been spending a lot of time watching every video of the spider guy that bystanders had posted to YouTube. 

Well, that was the official reason why. The reason Tony would give if anybody asked, not that anyone was going to. And it was certainly _a_ reason why, an important reason why. 

It just wasn't the only reason. 

The other reason was that Tony liked watching the guy move. Liked seeing all that strength, all those graceful flips and twists as he swung from his webbing, those superhuman bursts of speed. 

And, of course, by “liked,” Tony meant, “got incredibly turned on by.” 

It'd be almost funny if it wasn't depressing. If he didn't know damn well that it wasn't the guy in the spider suit he was reacting to, not really. He'd just managed to get his libido wired for “enhanced human,” and it didn't seem to be correcting itself just because that was going to be really inconvenient from here on out. 

But the guy in the spider suit was, at least, worth watching on his own merits. He was slim and lithe, despite his strength, and there was something about the way he moved--especially the way he swung from building to building on strands of webbing--that suggested that he was enjoying himself. Not the occasional violence against petty criminals--he seemed to avoid that whenever possible--but just relishing the things that he could do. 

Tony thought he remembered that feeling, even if he hadn't felt it in a long time now. And even in a stranger, it was enjoyable to watch. 

And, because the nights were long and Tony hadn't gotten over the side effects of his last fixation even if the fixation itself was mostly a memory now, most of the time when he watched those YouTube videos, it wasn't to hunt for clues to the guy's identity. 

It was to imagine him here, in Tony's bedroom, bringing all that strength and all that lovely flexibility and all that _joy_ along with him. To imagine all the things Tony and the spider-costumed vigilante could do together--without the risk of Tony falling too hard or too fast, because he didn't even know the guy's name. 

Sometimes, he had the decency to be ashamed that he was jerking off to viral YouTube videos of a guy stopping muggers, but then again, it could be a whole lot worse and a whole lot more embarrassing.

****

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, _fuck._

That was what Tony was: fucked. Absolutely and completely fucked. 

He--or more accurately, the people he'd been paying to do the grunt work--had figured out who the guy in the video was. It hadn't taken all that long; he might have been wearing a costume to hide his identity, but it was impossible to hide completely against a really determined search. 

The good news: the guy--Peter Parker--checked out clean. He was almost definitely not a megalomaniac in waiting, a secret ax murderer, or a deep-cover HYDRA agent, and the “almost” in “almost definitely” was just there because Tony really hated to be wrong and wanted to hedge his bets. 

The bad news, on the other hand, was really bad. 

Not so much for the Avengers. Just for Tony, personally. 

Peter Benjamin Parker was a student at the Midtown School of Science and Technology, where he had an excellent GPA and was on the academic decathlon team. 

Peter Parker was a sophomore in high school. 

Peter Parker was _fifteen years old._

And Tony Stark was clearly a dirty old man.

He'd known the guy was young--youngish, anyway. His build, the ease with which he moved--definitely not somebody Tony's age (which, Tony's brain helpfully pointed out, was _three times_ as old as Parker), unless he had some kind of secret to eternal youth going for him. 

But Tony had been thinking twenty-two, twenty-three. Maybe as young as twenty, or as old as twenty-five. When Tony had tried to picture the guy under the hoodie and the goggles, he'd been envisioning a (super-strong, super-fast, super-agile) twink, not a kid. 

There were pictures of Peter Parker in the file, because of course there were, and... okay, “twink” was not an inaccurate designation. Or at least, it probably wouldn't be, in a few years, because right now, Parker was, he reminded himself again, fifteen goddamn years old. Really adorable, with a mouth that was going to inspire a lot of filthy thoughts in a lot of people a couple of years from now (or in Tony, today), but. Fifteen. Years. Old. 

Well, that was the end of an excellent run of sexual fantasies, then. He'd just have to start watching porn like normal people. He'd been normal people--at least in that regard--for most of his life; he ought to be able to figure out how to do that again. 

Because obviously, _obviously_ , he wasn't going to keep fantasizing about the spider guy now that he knew that Parker was a kid. 

Consider recruiting him to the Avengers, maybe--the kid was already out there fighting crime, it wasn't like he'd be endangering an innocent bystander. Design a better suit for him, because that one was frankly pathetic--absolutely; Tony had been working on that in odd moments already. 

But he was going to keep his distance, and he was going to _stop_ having fantasies about the crime fighting spider, and he was going to make damn sure that Peter Parker never, ever had the faintest idea about all the terrible things Tony had thought (was still thinking) when he looked at him.

And then he was going to figure out a way to redirect his libido away from “people who can catch speeding cars with their bare hands,” because so far, that had led him to nothing but trouble. 

Yeah, he was definitely going to do all that. 

But he wasn't going to approach Parker until he'd finished the new suit--and run it past the Avengers, obviously, though even if they weren't interested, the guy deserved a decent spider-suit--and he wasn't going to focus on that until he finished testing the retro-framing device. 

So really, if he didn't stop watching the videos _right now_ , it would still be fine, and nobody would still be any the wiser. 

Meanwhile, watching that latest video again would probably give him some ideas for improving the suit, so it wasn't even _just_ for his own enjoyment. 

And if he said all of that enough times, maybe he'd be able to start believing it.

**Author's Note:**

> This author welcomes concrit. This author is also able to distinguish between "concrit" and "being a fucking troll," and will mock the shit out of you if you try the latter.


End file.
